Arbour press 1 gram kief mold

agreed. pill presses were certainly the only pre-made dies I saw in the appropriate size range.

However, filling 10 or 20 molds at once, simply by using a straight edge would be way more efficient than filling, or weighing, then filling, a single pill press mold (several thousand times) don’t you think?

maybe it’s just me, but the thought of individually weighing thousands of one gram piles of kief, loading each one into a mold, pressing, then empting the mold makes no sense.

call me lazy. I wouldn’t do more than 100 before heading to the machine shop for better tooling. if given the project scope up front, I probably wouldn’t press more than 20 before making a mold with at least 10 spots. if the harbour freight arbour press would take a 10x10 array, I’d start there. but it won’t. given the “about the size of a nickel” target, I believe a 2x10 or even a 4x10 (if you flip it half way through) would work. I am of course guessing at the OP’s press. theirs might have a bigger throat.

It might be that the kief source for the OP’s project is not in fact uniform enough to work with pile and scrape filling method (like making a level teaspoon) I’m suggesting. Which is were the 20 test presses come in. you drill one deep hole, drop in a measured gram a couple of times. figure out the correct depth. drill that size hole. pile, scrape, press, eject, weigh. 10 replicates should give you a good idea on repeatability. if you need to adjust the depth, do so. and redo the 10 replicates. now head back to the machine shop for the right tool.

drilling 40 21mm holes in a 4" x 10" x 2" chunk of Alu can be done with a drill press, but I’d suggest having it CNC machined to reduce variance in depth. getting the depth correct is the key to achieving advantage.

if you find too much variance in your “level nickel hole” sized test pucks, it might be necessary to weigh each hole full. in which case the holes should be drilled a little deeper in the array style mold.

shouldn’t cost you more than $200. you should get two or three. so you can have a buddy filling while you press. especially if you have to weigh each gram.

I believe @Beaker is only asking about $200k a year to do this in soapstone :slight_smile:

Edit: I guess in a pinch an appropriately sized scoop (see level teaspoon above) might give a slight advantage over weighing.

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